“WE have all wandered in and out of haunted places. They’re impossible to avoid. For the world is indeed a haunted place,” writes Glen Williams in his compelling and often frightening book, A Haunting Place.
The author explores some of the most haunting and haunted places in the world.
You can read about Melbourne’s Princess Theatre, The Gap in Sydney, the Eiffel Tower, Auschwitz, and the UK moors.
“So how do you know you are in a haunted place?” Williams asks. “It can be as subtle as a whisper, a sudden chill in an empty room, a quick, evasive shadow momentarily glimpsed from the corner of the eye.”
The first chapter – Aokigahara: The Suicide Forest in Japan – sets the spine-tingling tone. “This wooded hell-hole is without doubt one of the most chilling and haunted place in the world,” Williams writes. “Those brave/mad enough to venture in are reported to have found clothing and body parts while strolling through the aptly named ‘sea of trees’. Many visitors with psychic gifts have said the place reeks of evil and is overridden with demonic forces.”
Closer to home there’s Cape Leeuwin Lighthouse in WA where the ghost of a certain lighthouse keeper’s wife still resides in Cottage Three.
- A Haunting Place, New Holland Publishers, $35, www.newhollandpublishers.com